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Leaving Go

jozefg.bitbucket.org

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Re: Leaving Go

#11

Post by coherentpony »

DAddYE wrote: post #3

> I’ve been using Go since November and I’ve decided that it’s time to give it up for my hobby projects. I’d still be happy to use it professionally, but I find that programming in Go isn’t “fun” in the same way that Python, Haskell, or Lisp is. I can't leave go, but indeed I think absolutely the same. The thing is that GO was designed to replace c++ thing that absolutely failed. So we have a python/ruby replacement…

>The thing is that GO was designed to replace c++ thing that absolutely failed.

I was so excited for GO to become a nice replacement to C++. GO has awesome build times. C++ has awful build times. This is partly due to all the extra work the C preprocessor has to do make sure all the headers are present.

The big lose for me is the fact that GO has absolutely no operator overloading. This is one of the biggest wins in C++, especially since I do lot of high-performance scientific computing. Overloading operators makes code a lot more readable and user friendly, in my opinion (I'm others will disagree, though). I'm aware that you can hack GO to mimic operator overloading but it involves hitting the vtable. And hitting the vtable is completely unacceptable in performance-critical code.

Re: Leaving Go

#12

Post by tdees40 »

taylorlapeyre wrote: post #8

I just wanted to point out that the author of this article is a high school student. http://jozefg.bitbucket.org/about.html

Wow, "writing lots of compilers and type checkers" definitely wasn't on my radar screen when I was in high school.

Re: Leaving Go

#13

Post by chimeracoder »

masklinn wrote: post #10
chimeracoder wrote: post #5

As someone who writes both Lisp and Go (and enjoys both), I find it odd that this article uses Lisp and Haskell as points of comparison. > programming in Go isn’t “fun” in the same way that Python, Haskell, or Lisp is. Yes, writing Lisp is much more "fun" than writing Go for me. But writing Go is much more productive and maintainable (both for solo projects and for larger groups). In fact, this is almost an intention…

> CLOS is actually very similar in some ways to Go's structs. You've completely missed the article's point: users were able to create CLOS before it got integrated in the language.

Yes, my point is that Go intentionally makes it hard for users to extend the language, while simultaneously learning from the successes and failures of other languages, and Yes, my point is that Go intentionally makes it hard for users to extend the language, while simultaneously learning from the successes and failures of other languages, and incorporating the results of that into Go.

The fact that users are able to create core language features has its drawbacks when it comes to cohesion in the language community. Lisp itself is a perfect example of this - codebases are immensely fragmented in terms of which libraries they end up using (Quicklisp is, in part, an effort to solve this).

Lisp was "designed" (if you can call it that) around the principle that extending a language should be as easy as writing a program in that language. Go was designed around the principle that there should be only one dialect of the programming language, for the sake of cohesiveness.

Both are legitimate philosophies for different use cases, but that's why it's kind of silly (IMHO) to compare Go to Lisp - the goals are not only different, but diametrically opposed in most ways.

Re: Leaving Go

#15

Post by DAddYE »

lmm wrote: post #9
DAddYE wrote: post #3

> I’ve been using Go since November and I’ve decided that it’s time to give it up for my hobby projects. I’d still be happy to use it professionally, but I find that programming in Go isn’t “fun” in the same way that Python, Haskell, or Lisp is. I can't leave go, but indeed I think absolutely the same. The thing is that GO was designed to replace c++ thing that absolutely failed. So we have a python/ruby replacement…

Why can't you leave go? Haskell may have a steeper initial learning curve but I can't think of any environment where go is usable and Haskell isn't. (To me OCaml seems like a better replacement for a lot of what people are doing in go, but admittedly it doesn't have the same concurrency support)

Because go recently is on hype and thus many companies started to use it (the one where I work included).

Re: Leaving Go

#16

Post by ewood »

pjmlp wrote: post #2

I had similar reasons, but on my case the language was still at pre-1.0.

May I ask what languages you tend to favour? I've had a few friends tell me lately that they were all giving up on Go after persisting with it since early 2010. They are all people who tend to work in C/C++ so they don't tend to be thrown by a steep learning curve. I'm quite surprised because they were all vocal proponents in the beginning.

Re: Leaving Go

#17

Post by piokuc »

lmm wrote: post #7

Does anyone actually use CLOS? It's always held up as this great example of language extensibility, but my impression is that since it's not part of the core language Lisp folk tend to create their own abstractions instead.

Not sure what you mean by "not part of core language" - CLOS is part of ANSI Common Lisp standard.

Re: Leaving Go

#18

Post by pron »

It's ironic that the "better" the language (for some hazy definition of "better") the less actual work seems to get done with it. So Go can be pretty annoying at times, and so can Java (I've said before that I find the two almost identical, but that's beside the point now); and C is horrible and completely unsafe and downright dangerous. Yet more useful working code has probably been written in Java and C than all other languages combined since the invention of the computer, and more useful code has been written in, what, 5 years of Go(?) than in 20(?) years of Haskell.

Here's the thing: I am willing to accept that Haskell is the best programming language ever created. People have been telling me this for over 15 years now. And yet it seems like the most complex code written in Haskell is the Haskell compiler itself (and maybe some tooling around it). If Haskell's clear advantages really make that much of a difference, maybe its (very vocal) supporters should start doing really impressive things with it rather than write compilers. I don't know, write a really safe operating system; a novel database; some crazy Watson-like machine; a never-failing hardware controller. Otherwise, all of this is just talk.

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